More info about Gangstar Vegas revealed along with the first gameplay video

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Take a look at our new handsome protagonist.

After a lot of speculation and a short CG video teaser Gameloft released last month, the famous video game developer revealed some additional info about the sixth installment of their GTA-inspired Gangstar series in form of a dev video diary. So, here’s what we’ve found out about Gangstar Vegas today:

Gameloft Montreal, the development team behind the game revealed that they decided that Las Vegas will be the host of the new Gangstar game because it’s a truly “iconic” and diverse city. The map of Gangstar Vegas will be around nine square kilometers in size, which means that it’ll be almost nine times bigger than the previous installment of the franchise, Gangstar Rio: City of Saints. Though half of the map size consists out of the desert and the wilderness surrounding Las Vegas where not much is going on, it’s still an impressive fact, especially considering that this time, a lot of the action in the game will be taking place indoors, i.e. a lot more buildings will be accessible.

It was also revealed that the new Gangstar will be powered by the well-known Havok Physics engine, developed by the Irish company of the same name. Over the course of the last twelve years, a over 500 games have been powered by one of the versions of Havok Physics, including a lot of AAA titles such as those from the Assassin’s Creed series, The Witcher 2, Age of Empires III, SWAT 4, Lord of the Rings: Online, Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Declassified, and many, many others.

Also, the short gameplay sequences presented in the aforementioned video diary reveal that all of the activities from Gangstar Rio: City of Saints like illegal races, gambling, and taxi and ambulance missions are making a comeback, but we also got a glimpse at something that looks like boxing matches. Don’t expect Fight Club: The Game, but it’s certainly going to add some additional variety to the already rich gameplay.

Strippers confirmed.

Another interesting thing we’ve noticed is that motion capture and face capture technology has been used for all aspects of Gangstar Vegas; even the strippers have been animated by real-life performers, though they were dressed in a much less provocative spandex/lycra suit than their digital dopplegängers.

It’s worth mentioning that this was only the first part of the dev diary, while the other two are coming out in the next couple of weeks. As for the game itself, it’s probably launching on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store by the end of the month, at a premium price of $6.99. We’re still not sure whether this open world action-adventure will feature any in-app purchases that Gameloft took a liking to in recent years (we hope not), but as always – we’ll keep you posted.